I love to talk about the Russian tanks though. And Stalingrad.

Just the echo chamber effect

I think, it is Mauser 98k rifle, although I'm not sure.

Japan was already surrendering, actually. but it was to the Soviets

They tried twice, one directly to USA but it was refused, and second time they asked USSR for mediation but USSR also refused since they were bound by Tehran promise to attack Japan and were not neutral.

I've always thought it would have resulted in two Japans, like how Korea and Germany got split. But I have no idea where the socialists in Japan would have gained power. I know they existed though, like that guy who got killed with a sword on TV.

Second only to the gurhkas

To quote myself talking about someone using it as a source in their youtube video:

"Guns Germs and Steel" a notorious pop-history book that has recieved a lot of negative criticism from historians for its inaccurate and infantilising depictions of native American civilisations, amongst other things, painting the conquest of the Americas as an "us or them" style thing, portraying it as "inevitable" and making absurd and insulting claims about native American groups, like the Inca being too stupid to know what an ambush was, because they didn't have horses.

It's simplistic and lacks nuance. Russia in the spring and early summer is very muddy, and would slow down an invasion more than the winter, and autumn turns to winter very quickly, so there's only really about a month and half of the year that you could actually "invade", but it is borderline impossible to actually organise and carry out an invasion of such a massive country in such a short amount of time.

It's spoken by a lot of these guys as a Truism rather than an actual examination of Russia's material conditions.

The problem with (not) invading Russia in the winter is twofold really. It's so damn cold that invading during winter is a bad idea, but that's true to a lesser extent just about anywhere. The second problem is that Russia is so goddamn massive that you can't reasonably invade all or even part of it before winter sets back in. Operation Barbarossa started in June

I think it goes back to the idea that liberals and fascists believe that the Nazis only failed to conquer the USSR because of the winter, not because of the superior Soviet society they were attempting to destroy. What these modern geniuses fail to recognize is that the Soviets also had to deal with that winter, and unlike the Nazis, they did so successfully.

I mean the most famous case of a successful invasion of Russia is the Mongols, who did in fact invade during the winter. So that "advice" only works in specific contexts and times, it's not like some self-evident Fact like these folks love to parrot.